Battle of the Sexes: Aryna Sabalenka and Nick Kyrgios' tennis show meets the weight of history
SOURCE:The Athletic|BY:Sarah Shephard
Half a century after Billie Jean King beat Bobby Riggs, the WTA world No. 1 believes this match is good for women's tennis. Critics disagree
Women’s tennis is at the peak of its powers as the 2026 season comes into view, after five different players won its five biggest titles in the sport this year. And the woman at the top of the world rankings has an idea of what might elevate it to “a higher level”: an exhibition match against a man, played on a modified court.
“By putting myself in this situation, playing a guy, I’m inspiring the next generation (of women) to be great, to challenge yourself, to be strong,” Sabalenka said in a news conference ahead of the event, side by side with Kyrgios, who is the current world No. 673 after just seven competitive matches in three years due to injury.
“What other sport in the world can you have your favourite female player and some of your fave male players on the same court competing? It’s gonna be a show,” Kyrgios said during the pair’s joint interview with Piers Morgan earlier this month.
The name of that “show” is in homage to a match in September 1973, which pitted the 29-year-old Billie Jean King, an eventual 12-time Grand Slam singles champion and a founding member of the women’s tennis tour, against former men’s world number one Bobby Riggs, who had retired 22 years earlier and was 55.
The repercussions of that match extended far beyond the parameters of the regulation court on which it was played.
King had founded the WTA and forced equal prize money for men and women at the U.S. Open just a few months earlier. It was a foundational moment for the women’s movement, and defeat for King, she feared, would spell doom for all that she and so many others had worked so hard to secure. Riggs had easily beaten Margaret Court, the top women’s player, earlier that year.
In front of a reported 30,472 people in the Astrodome in Houston, Texas, and an estimated 90 million watching worldwide, King won 6-4, 6-3, 6-3 and sent out the message that women’s sports and athletes deserved equal respect and recognition.
Half a century years on, as Sabalenka, 27, and 30-year-old Kyrgios — who both declined to be interviewed for this story — meet, it is less clear what is at stake.
The 2025 edition has been criticized as a lose-lose contest for Sabalenka and for women’s tennis, which has since become the leading women’s sport in the world, with revenues, sponsorships and prize money that dwarf its equivalents across basketball, soccer and other team and individual sports.
Its world No. 1’s meeting with Kyrgios exists adjacent to that, in a universe where the spectacle is the point, reusing a name whose sporting resonance has not faded for an event that is not, its architects and critics agree, in a place to live up to it.
Aryna Sabalenka has been a dominant force in women’s tennis for the past two years. (Dan Isitene / Getty Images)
While the match has been organized by publisher Tatler, the genesis of Sabalenka and Kyrgios’ involvement comes from their shared representation, Evolve, a company co-founded by agent Stuart Duguid and four-time women’s Grand Slams champion Naomi Osaka, though the latter left that venture this month.
During an interview in November, Duguid said that a match like this has loomed large in discussions he’s had during his career in the sport.
“As long as I’ve been working in tennis, people have always said to me, whoever the number one woman is, ‘Do you think she would beat the men’s number 250? Would she beat a (male) college player?’” he said. “So there’s definitely interest in it. People are definitely curious.”
The parameters of the match are tacit indications that the answer to the two questions above is, “Probably not.”
Both players will have one serve per point, instead of two, and the court will be 9 percent smaller on Sabalenka’s side than Kyrgios’, reducing his service advantage and forcing him to have bigger margins when hitting the ball.
Duguid calls that number the result of “rough scientific work” based on disparities in performance found not in tennis but in athletics and swimming world records, he said. “I don’t think it’s a controversial opinion to say if they play a regular match, Kyrgios would be the strong favorite. I don’t think anyone that’s ever watched tennis would debate that,” Duguid said.
The wider question is whether or not tennis still needs to have that debate, and whether or not it needs to have it with these protagonists.
There are still inequalities in prize money. The scheduling at Grand Slams, especially the French Open — whose organizers maintain they make decisions on match-quality alone — often seems to prioritize men’s matches over women’s ones. But before and since King’s historic victory over Riggs, the best women’s players in the world have either lost to males in similar exhibitions, or said outright that they simply could not beat a guy because of the physical disparity.
Riggs thrashed Margaret Court, world No. 1 at the time and one of King’s fiercest rivals, 6-2, 6-1 four months before the latter beat him.
In a 2013 appearance on David Letterman’s U.S. TV chat show, now 23-time Grand Slam champion Serena Williams said Andy Murray, who had just won the second of his three career majors at that year’s Wimbledon, would beat her “6-0, 6-0 in five or six minutes”.
During a news conference at the recent WTA Tour Finals, the season-ending competition for the best eight women in the world, Sabalenka herself said, “If I would play against someone who’s been playing on tour, has matches in his bag, I would have, probably, not that many chances.”
Billie Jean King’s 1973 Battle of the Sexes came at a hinge moment for the future of women’s sports. (Associated Press)
She also acknowledged King’s legacy in women’s sports in a statement ahead of the event.
Duguid, who described Sabalenka’s opponent this week as a “controversial figure in tennis” but “absolutely not washed-up”, also described Kyrgios as a “friend of women’s tennis or women’s sport”.
In 2023, Kyrgios pleaded guilty to common assault of his then girlfriend Chiara Passari two years earlier before the charge was dismissed in an Australian court. He has also been criticized for his commentary about women in tennis. The following year, Kyrgios was admonished for writing “second serve” under a picture of himself and another ex: fellow ATP Tour star Jannik Sinner’s by-then-girlfriend, the top-40 WTA player Anna Kalinskaya.
He was also fined $10,000 in 2015, after the on-court microphones at a match in Montreal, Canada, picked up the Australian telling Stan Wawrinka that fellow men’s player Thanasi Kokkinakis had “banged his girlfriend”. Kyrgios later apologized for the remark on Facebook, writing: “My comments were made in the heat of the moment and were unacceptable on many levels.”
Kyrgios has described his increased maturity in interviews ahead of this event, describing himself as “proud of the person I am today” in an interview with the BBC. And Duguid is adamant that both players’ involvement — and the appearance fees with which their participation is being rewarded — makes this a positive for women’s sport.
“If Sabalenka’s playing in a really elevated, high-profile match and the match is competitive, why would that not be a good thing for women’s tennis?”
One player who has firsthand experience of such an event is Karsten Braasch, the mercurial German who found himself playing 16- and 17-year-old versions of Serena and Venus Williams during the 1998 Australian Open.
“You know when you respond to something without thinking?” Braasch said during a phone interview. “I said, ‘Why don’t you try it?’ I’m ranked 203 (in the world at the time).”
Braasch, then 30, met a challenge from the Williams sisters that stemmed from the pair going to the ATP Tour office at the Melbourne major and asking if they could play against men. He would play Serena, with no money on the line, in a matchup designed to be a test of the sisters’ theoretical confidence rather than a referendum on the state of women’s sports.
The day before, the sisters won a doubles match at the Australian Open. In the news conference afterwards, Serena let slip that she had another “big match” tomorrow. There was confusion among the press. She quickly quelled it.
“I’m playing a guy,” said Serena.
“Then it started to become quite big,” Braasch recalled. “Otherwise, we would have just played on the very last court in Australia and probably not a lot of people would have noticed it.”
On the day, there were just a few hundred fans and players in the stands, and a crowd of media had gathered too to cover the match, which was originally supposed to consist of just one set against Serena.
Braasch raced to a 5-0 lead, at which point Venus arrived to watch, following a three-set quarterfinal defeat to Lindsay Davenport. When the set finished, with Braasch winning 6-1, Venus took Serena’s place on court to try and avenge her sister’s loss. Match two played out similarly, ending 6-2 and securing Braasch a moment of fame which only grew with time, as the Williams sisters went on to become two of the greatest players in the women’s game.
When Braasch returned to the locker room, he bumped into eventual 14-time Grand Slam champion Pete Sampras, who congratulated him on his success. “I didn’t see you out there,” said Braasch, confused. Sampras explained he’d been in his hotel room, watching the Australian Open. During a break on the main court, Australia’s Channel 7 had switched to showing his match.
“It wasn’t a disaster for women’s tennis. It was fun; they were challenging somebody from the men’s tour, they got beaten, that’s it. It was no big deal,” Braasch said. “I found out later it was just for the history books, more or less… We shouldn’t compare men’s and women’s sports.”
Braasch believes that only the men’s tour can lose in this matchup, should Sabalenka win it, joining many voices in tennis as describing it as an exhibition with a name that it cannot support.
“The ‘Battle of the Sexes’ goes against the tide of what we’re seeing and what we are trying to change in society, never mind in sport,” sports and entertainment marketing executive and founder Steve Martin said during a phone interview.
“I think when they’re using the name, it conjures up the idea that this is a big issue, whereas I’m not sure it is. I think they’re obviously trying to reframe something that exists to give it some kind of credibility, because it feels like a pretty contrived event — a bit more like a stunt as opposed to having any real depth or purpose to it.”
Duguid echoed Martin’s view that the match is to be “more skewed to entertainment” than sport.
“That’s our north-star in this event,” Duguid said. “I think it reflects a large part about what we’re trying to do in a similar vein to a Jake Paul fight, which again will be unappealing to some people, but I think the numbers don’t lie” — aligning with Kyrgios and Sabalenka’s overriding view that the spectacle is their match’s own reason for being, even as women’s tennis will enter 2026 dealing with the ramifications of the result.
King’s view is equally clear.
“Ours was about social change; culturally, where we were in 1973. This one is not,” she said during an interview with the BBC.
